Hot take, but modern games have too many things to collect or too many different currency types. These almost feel like different issues with different end goals, but I’m going to lump them together. It started with open-world games. You open your map and it’s covered in icons, points of interest, and collectibles. It evolved with free-to-play games with multiple currencies to earn, which are all used to upgrade or purchase different things. One is an illusion of depth, artificially padding a game’s activities; the other is weaponized confusion to get you to spend money in a free game. Both are bloated and unnecessary.
The earliest example I can remember of experiencing this personally is with GTA IV. In the open world, there were a ton of pigeons throughout the map. If you found all 200 hidden pidgeons, you would unlock the “flying rat” achievement, and a helicopter would spawn for you. This was back when you had cheats built into the game, so spawning a helicopter was commonplace. What’s the point? Masochism? This is very similar to the Korok seeds in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Collecting these seeds affords you upgraded inventory space, but you only need 450 seeds to upgrade fully. What do you get for collecting all 900 korok seeds? A golden poo that does nothing.
Sometimes it’s not just side content that’s bloated with collectibles; sometimes it’s the main objective. In Super Mario Odyssey, you collect moons to power your ship to get to the next world. The issue here is that there are about 880 moons to collect in the game, but you only need 124 to beat the game. 250 moons unlocks a new bonus kingdom, 500 moons unlocks a hard version of that kingdom, 880 moons makes the last boss fight harder, and 999 moons will just add a little cosmetic flair to the Odyssey ship and Peach’s Castle. That’s it. Having 800 collectable moons means that most of them aren’t worth getting, and the ones that are don’t feel special or unique. Sometimes you get a moon for defeating a boss and sometimes you get a moon for ground pounding a little patch of ground—extremely diminishing returns.
This is made worse in follow-up from the same team, Donkey Kong Bananza. In this game, instead of moons, you collect Bananas. The only difference here is you don’t need a certain number of bananas to progress to the next level, instead, bananas are used to upgrade Donkey Kong. This time, you don’t need anything to get to the end, so you don’t have to collect any bananas realistically. You can also collect bananium chips (used to buy bananas), fossils (used to buy cosmetics), and gold, which you can also buy stuff with, and you lose some gold when you die. At fist I had a blast collecting these things, just like in Odyseey. After you’ve collected so many of these and you’re still in the first level/kingdom/layer it quickly loses appeal. Not only was I slowly getting less dopamine from each banana I found, but once I learned that I didn’t need any of it, that plummeted. Why can’t we have one or two currencies? This isn’t a gacha game.
Speaking of gacha games, these are probably the worst offenders regarding too many currencies. This may be by design, though. Since gacha games are free-to-play and rely heavily on customer spending, they confuse the player with multiple currencies and materials for upgrades in hopes that they will spend money to avoid the frustration. I recently play-tested a new gacha game and was just reminded how every gacha game looks similar with their menu design, gacha mechanics, and a sickening amount of currencies and materials. I only really got into one gacha game and that is Zenless Zone Zero, so lets use them as an example. In this game, you have 9 different currencies and over 20 upgrade materials depending on the character class. Each has its own cost and way of earning this currency or material. It can all be overwhelming to the point of numbing.
There’s a reason these both exist. People like chasing that carrot on the stick. It feels good to get a moon in Mario, a banana in Donkey Kong, and, man, it feels good to pull the character you want in a gacha game. However, these can have diminishing returns, especially when those items quickly lose their perceived value. It reminds me of a Futurama episode where they parody the Twilight Zone. In this example, the character, a professional gambler, gets hit by a car and is transported to a casino at a slot machine. They pull the lever and immediately win, and the character says, “A casino where I’m winning? That car must’ve killed me, I must be in heaven!” They pull the lever, win again, and say, “A casino where I’m always winning? That’s boring, I must really be in…hell!”